


That Old Brooklyn Heresy

by trinityofone



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Future Fic, M/M, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 11:18:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6564160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/pseuds/trinityofone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve comes back from the dead (again). Some things have changed. Others will always be the same.</p>
<p>No spoilers for <i>Captain America: Civil War</i>, just a last-ditch effort to play with elements of comics canon regarding Steve’s return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiveyearmission (fishandcustard)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fiveyearmission+%28fishandcustard%29).



> Happy Birthday, fiveyearmission!
> 
>  
> 
>   
> 
> 
> And with many thanks to siriaeve for looking this over! <3 

Steve is falling. The fall seems endless: he and the Red Skull locked together as the _Valkyrie_ plunges out of the sky. The Red Skull is taunting him as they grapple, saying his name over and over—“Steve, Steve!”—coupled with the occasional dismissive, “ _Please_ ,” as if Steve isn’t even worth the time.

“You’re getting awful familiar,” Steve says, shoving the Red Skull back against a wall, which rolls beneath them and becomes the floor. “You want me to start calling you Johann?”

The Red Skull’s eyes, narrowed in a grimace of struggle and concentration, go wide as he manages to buck Steve off. “Come on,” he says, wheedling, almost pleading, “you’re stronger than this!”

“I’ll show you just how strong I am,” Steve says, running at him, and the world tips, and somehow the Red Skull has Steve’s shield. He braces himself behind it as Steve launches himself at him. Steve feels a fiery rage in his head; he wants nothing more than to beat the source of the Red Skull’s name into an even redder pulp. 

The Red Skull is ineffective at countering his blows. He huddles behind the shield and refuses to lash out. “Coward,” Steve spits. He grips the Vibranium rim and yanks. “Give this back. It’s mine; you don’t deserve it!”

To his surprise, the Red Skull lets go. “Take it, it’s yours.” He’s staring up at Steve, and Steve can’t see any of the expected rage on his face, only feel it rattling around in his own skull. The _Valkyrie_ flips, Steve’s world spins. He must be suffering from vertigo because his vision seems to pulse.

He stumbles back a step. A mistake: he should be moving in for the kill. The Red Skull knows it too: he reaches out a gloved hand.

“Come back, come back to me…” His voice shouldn’t sound like this. Steve hears a roaring between his ears, like the plane’s already crashed, like he’s already underwater.

“Steve, please: you’re stronger than him, pal. I know you. I know you’re in there—”

“No!” Steve doesn’t think he says it, but the word comes out of his mouth. His body moves forward as if of its own accord. He feels his lips twist up into a grin. “The world can only accept one Captain America. The one it _trusts_. The one it’s _missed_. The one who will make this country and the world great again—”

He’s hefting the shield, steadying it for the death blow. The Red Skull still hasn’t moved: he’s just lying there, staring up at Steve with something like grief in his eyes. His mouth’s set into a thin, tragic line, yet Steve would swear he can hear him laughing. 

“Face it,” Steve hears himself say, “you were always the inferior model.”

He brings the shield down. Steve tries to stop himself but he can’t control his arms, his body, the rage building inside of him as he smashes the rim of the shield down hard enough to sheer the Red Skull’s head from his neck.

At the last second, Bucky brings up his left arm, and the shield takes a chunk out of his wrist instead.

“I’m not going to fight you,” Bucky pants, “but I’m not going to let you kill me, either.”

“You don’t have a choice,” says someone with Steve’s voice, Steve’s mouth. “I can feel myself burning him up. Soon I’ll be the only one left.”

“Steve’s stronger than you think.” Bucky levers himself up. His left hand hangs limp, sparking. His cowl has fallen back, revealing a deep cut along the edge of his scalp, blood seeping into his dark hair. _He’s cut it_ , Steve thinks, irrelevantly—except that stray thought feels like a balm. Bucky’s here. Bucky’s standing in front of him, wearing Steve’s uniform.

“You’re not the first person to underestimate him.” Bucky grins through bloodied teeth.

When Steve—Steve’s shield arm, Steve’s body, but never Steve, _never again_ —lashes out at him, Bucky ducks. He rolls, twists, skips up the steps where he had previously been pinned. They’re at the courthouse, Steve realizes, right where he’d—

Been shot. Died.

Died?

Spotlights whirl overhead. Steve’s surroundings seems to leach back into color: not the _Valkyrie_ , but its intended destination. Not the past, but the future—the _present_. Bucky, lit by the swirling lights of news choppers. Natasha and Sam are standing at the top of the steps, braced against a column, Natasha holding onto Sam’s forearm and wrenching him back.

“Ninety seconds,” Natasha says.

“No!” snaps Bucky. “I need more time. _Steve!_ ”

“He’s gone, Sergeant,” says the thing that’s possessed Steve’s tongue. “I’ve hollowed him out even more thoroughly than Zola managed with you.” He swipes out a leg, almost disdainful, and Steve can feel the sickening crack of Bucky’s kneecap.

Bucky shakes his head even as he crumples. “He brought me back. I’m gonna return the favor.”

“After your little archer friend shoots this body with a tranquilizer? Let him do it; it’ll destroy the ghost of whatever’s left of your Captain. And then I’ll be back and stronger than ever, having defeated the imposter who’s been masquerading as me—”

Bucky snorts. “That’s rich.”

The parody of Steve’s voice continues, undaunted. “—at the very site where he attempted to have me killed. What a story, yes?” He looks up at the circling helicopters. Steve thinks he sees a bright red streak—is that Tony? Keeping the choppers back?—but then the thing coiled along Steve’s spine turns his head back to face Bucky. “Smile for the cameras.”

Bucky does. It’s not a vicious smile. It’s soft, gentle—pinched a little around the edges from the pain, but fond. Beyond fond. He’s not looking at the choppers, but deep into Steve’s eyes, like he can still see what’s there somewhere, behind them.

And Steve—

Steve is grappling with the Red Skull as the _Valkyrie_ plummets out of the sky.

“Come on,” Bucky says. He wasn’t there on the plane, but he’s here now. “You didn’t take this shit from Billy McCallister in sixth grade; you’re really going to take it now?”

The Red Skull’s hands are around Steve’s throat. They’re burning, the way Steve saw him burn as he died, and Steve can feel the fire threatening to engulf his own body. Too much longer and it’s going to take him; he will be nothing but anger and madness and pain.

Steve stumbles back, tugging the Red Skull with him to the bow of the plane. 

“I’m not leaving you,” Bucky says. His voice sounds strained. Steve can feel his windpipe compress under what used to be Steve’s own hands. “If you’re going down, we’ll go down together.”

Steve falls back against the _Valkyrie_ ’s helm. 

“Go ahead,” the Red Skull spits—spits at Bucky using Steve’s voice. “End it.”

“But I wish you’d stay.” Bucky’s voice is little more than a hoarse whisper. Steve’s shield’s been dropped, abandoned within Bucky’s range, but he’s not reaching for it. “The future’s no fun without you.”

Steve can picture how easy it would be to put the plane in the water. Push back and fall: the waves would swallow them up. They’d extinguish the flames—wouldn’t they?

“Clint, now!” Natasha says.

“No!” Bucky pushes out a last breath. “There’s got to be another way—”

Steve drops. He falls flat against Bucky, jerking the helm and plunging the plane into freefall as he goes.

He can feel Bucky’s arm close around him.

Bucky has a parachute.

Bucky has the shield.

He wrenches it into place just in time for Clint’s arrow to ping off its side.

Steve hears the Red Skull scream as he tumbles toward the black water. But they’re drifting farther and farther apart. Steve’s rising up as the plane falls, pressed tight to Bucky’s chest. Then there’s light, and fresh air touching his cheeks. 

He opens his eyes.

“Bucky.”

“ _Steve_.”

Whatever expression may have been about to break across Bucky’s face is replaced by a look of concentration as he rolls them with his bent and broken hand away from another one of Clint’s arrows. “Stop, stop! I’ve got him! He’s _Steve_. Fucking hell.”

Natasha is suspicious. She asks him half a dozen questions—directly, rapid-fire—and then subtly slips in another dozen more—that he catches—as she guides them on a byzantine route away from the courthouse and the swirling lights of the choppers. Steve feels dizzy, not yet fully present in his own body, which under the circumstances is terrifying—so in a weird way it’s helpful to have to focus on Natasha’s flat interrogative voice. Bucky and Sam flank him on either side, neither in any way pretending not to stare, and slowly, Steve starts to feel real again under the weight of their eyes.

He balks when it becomes apparent that they're approaching the Tower. It had gotten to the point where he never thought that he’d come here again: this was enemy territory. But Sam takes his first tentative touch, squeezing Steve’s shoulder, and Bucky says, “It’s okay. Trust me.”

Steve has himself braced to confront Tony when they reach the lab, but instead there’s just Bruce, back from who knows where and a little awkward around everyone—not that that’s new. He shakes Steve’s hand, then seems to regret it, and goes in for what Steve knows Sam would deem an inelegant bro-hug.

Sam _does_ seem affronted. “Oh, are we skipping the tests and going straight for the hugs? No one told me that.” He turns to Steve and offers him a full-on embrace: none of that—his words again—back-slapping frat-boy nonsense. “I’m going to be real embarrassed later if it turns out I hugged the Red Skull,” Sam says as he pulls back, but clearly he doesn’t think he did: the corners of his eyes are wet with tears.

Steve feels overwhelmed. He rubs a hand across the back of his neck and looks around at his (former?) friends for some sort of help, an anchor in all of this insanity. “I’m _not_ the Red Skull. How did that even become a, a possibil…”

He trails off, suddenly taking in a dozen details at once: the new lines around Bruce’s eyes; the scar on Clint’s nose that wasn’t there last time Steve saw him but that’s already aged down to white; Bucky, Bucky in Steve’s uniform—or not _Steve’s_ , a version of it fitted and designed for Bucky, possibly even here in this Tower which all the people who most wanted to lock him away forever once called their home base…

Steve swallows hard. “How long’s it been this time?”

They all look at each other. Natasha, as usual, is the one strong enough to deliver the bad news: “Three years,” she says. “Just about.”

Steve can tell from Bucky’s face—Sam’s too, probably—that he knows the exact number down to the day. “Three years,” Steve repeats, forcing a faint chuckle. “Well, that’s better than last time.”

No one is amused.

“Let’s not waste any more time,” Steve says, after a minute. “Scan my brain or whatever it is you have to do.”

Bruce does. Bucky adheres himself to Steve’s side the entire time, occasionally interjecting as Sam tries to explain how they all ended up here.

“So you thought I was dead, but actually I’d been kidnapped by Hydra, who kept my body in stasis until they could imprint it with the Red Skull’s soul, which they’d been keeping in some sort of gem?” Steve wonders if Bucky can see Father O’Connell throwing up his hands in despair as vividly as Steve can. 

“Hey,” says Sam, “my life only got like this after I met _you_.”

“There was a body,” Bucky says. His voice sounds thick; there are bruises already fading around his throat, and Steve feels a wrenching rush of guilt. Those are his fingerprints on Bucky’s skin. “They planted a cloned body. But they had you. They had you the whole time—”

“Hey,” Steve says, “it’s okay. You didn’t know.” _At least you_ saw _a body_ , he thinks, which is more than he can say for himself.

“Bruce,” Bucky snaps, turning away, “tell us what I already know.”

“It’s him,” Bruce says, staring up at the colorful web of lines Steve supposes are him, his brain. 

“ _Just_ him?” asks Natasha.

Bruce shrugs, smiles tentatively. “As far as I can tell.”

“Yay,” says Clint, clapping Steve on the shoulder. “Welcome to the club, Cap.”

Before Steve can work out what he means, his attention is drawn to the tension brewing between Bucky and Natasha. 

“We should wait until Wanda gets back,” Natasha says, watching Bucky calmly, her arms folded across her chest in a manner that’s not-quite-casual. “Have her check him _her_ way too.”

“I’m satisfied.” Bucky, to anyone else, would seem calm, too.

“It’s a risk.”

Bucky rolls his shoulders. He hadn’t let Bruce treat his neck or his knee, but while Bruce’d had Steve under the scanner, Bucky had taken out a small bag of tools and quietly reattached the severed wires in his wrist. The arm doesn’t quite look as good as new, but it appears functional. “It’s been kind of a long night, Natalia.”

Natasha’s small sigh reads like a huge exhalation of breath would in anyone else. “James…”

“I was there with him,” Bucky says quietly. “I saw him fight back and I saw when he won. I want to take him home.”

Natasha’s arms unfold. She murmurs something else—Steve’s hearing is good enough that he can pick out the words, but they’re in Russian. Her fingers ghost across Bucky’s arm and then she turns to him.

“It wasn’t the same around here without you, Rogers.”

Steve says, “I missed you, too.”

They’re not talking about the last three years.

Natasha nods and starts to turn away.

“We’ll talk more soon?” Steve hazards. The sting of her betrayal—what he’d thought of as her betrayal—isn’t gone, but in that moment it feels numbed to next to nothing. He has missed her—more than either of them could ever probably convey, but.

He just came back from the dead. Again.

“Of course,” Natasha says, in her lovely familiar whiskey-warm voice. Then she turns back to Bucky. “Tomorrow. When you bring him back to see Wanda.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Thanks for keeping track of my schedule.” He reaches out a hand to Steve. “Come on. No offense, Bruce, but your lab’s not the friendliest place to reacquaint yourself with the world.”

Something inside Steve curdles as he remembers that he wasn’t here when Bucky likely went through this—tests and brain scans and stares full of lingering suspicion. When he and Sam had first begun their search for Bucky, immediately after the fall of SHIELD, Steve had had all these fantasies of what it would be like to bring Bucky in, bring him home. None of them had come true.

But, “Whadaya think?” Bucky says to him now, in a facsimile of his old voice, his old manner. “You wanna come back to my place?”

Some ancient, instinctual part of Steve prickles, feeling Clint, feeling Bruce, feeling Sam and Natasha watching them. But then he shakes it out of his head the way he shook out the Red Skull. 

“Fuck, yes,” Steve says, and reaches out and grabs Bucky’s hand.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky’s got a ridiculous black Hayabusa that looks more like a tank than a bike. “Compensating for something?” Steve asks.

“You know I’m not.” Bucky’s smirk looks a little put on, but it softens to a more genuine smile as Steve straddles the seat behind him.

“Are you sure your knee—”

“Hold on tight, Rogers.”

It’s such a wonderful, surprising thing, to go fast when nobody’s chasing them.

Bucky takes them to Brooklyn; Steve never doubted for a moment that he would. The building’s a brownstone; in the eyes of Steve’s youth, it looks like a palace. In this strange, modern world where Brooklyn is “trendy,” it still probably cost an arm and a leg, but that’s fine by Steve: Bucky should have everything he could possibly want, far as he’s concerned.

Bucky unlocks the front door and flicks on a little lamp, casting the foyer in a yellow-orange glow. The apartment, as far as Steve can see, is perhaps under-decorated, but far from spartan, and Steve—who never managed to hang up his art at his place in D.C. and left his rooms at the tower exactly how Pepper designed them—can’t exactly cast stones in that regard. Steve takes off his boots because Sarah Rogers raised him right, then follows Bucky further into the living room.

“Are you hungry?” Bucky asks.

“Like I haven’t eaten in years.” This sounds funny in Steve’s head, but Bucky doesn’t crack a smile. Suddenly Steve’s picturing all the meals Bucky ate without him—alone in this room, even. He knows—god does he know—that Bucky doesn’t _need_ him, that he’s more than capable of looking after himself, and that to top it all off, he’s clearly made friends with Sam, with some sort of reformed version of the Avengers. Maybe it’s all the meals _Steve_ ate alone before Bucky came back that he’s thinking of. Steve swallows and looks down at Bucky’s shiny wood floors. “I guess I could go for a sandwich or something.”

Bucky makes them grilled cheese: buttering the bread, frying up some bacon till it’s crispy, thickly slicing a fresh tomato. He doesn’t sing to himself anymore, as he moves around the kitchen, but he’s still light on his feet, confident, nimble-fingered. Steve remembers all the times he watched Bucky cook for him, wrapped in blankets on the couch, Bucky with little more than a hot plate to work with then. “You’ll make some lucky fella a good wife,” he used to joke, when he was feeling ornery at his own lack of contribution—he could barely get up some days, though his mouth always seemed to work. Bucky always had a good-natured retort: “You know me, Steve, I’m more of the love 'em and leave ‘em type,” “Why waste all of this on just one man?” “I’m saving myself for Clark Gable.” Steve’d pull his shroud of blankets tighter and burn with fever and jealousy.

What a dumb waste.

He goes up behind Bucky now, like he always wished he’d had the courage to do then, and wraps his arms around him, tucks his chin against the hollow of his throat. “Is this okay?” he asks, and when Bucky, spatula in hand, still stiff-shouldered, nods, Steve kisses him. He kisses his beautiful jawline and his poor bruised neck. He turns him around and kisses his mouth. Bucky’s washed his face, but he still tastes a little coppery with blood. It doesn’t matter; there was a stretch of years when Steve almost never did _not_ have a split lip. Steve wraps his arms around Bucky’s waist and kisses him and kisses him until he starts to feel like he’s floating again, up up up out of the carcass of the _Valkyrie_. This is the only thing he wants. This is what he was truly hungry for.

One thing that's never changed, in a century of more change than Steve ever thought possible: they’ve always been desperate for each other. The first time they kissed—drunk and giddy and young, god, so young still—Steve had thought this was it: the dam finally breaking after years and years of the water building up, the torrent growing until it was a furious thing. But it never stopped being like that. He's never stopped wanting Bucky’s mouth and Bucky's body and Bucky by his side, in every way imaginable, in friendship and in love. A hundred years and at least five lives between them, and it still isn’t enough.

“We really oughta talk,” Bucky says at one point. He’s abandoned the spatula, pushed Steve back against a cabinet. Steve nods in agreement; Bucky nods back; then they both abandon the idea. They abandon the kitchen—Bucky at least remembers to turn off the burner, so no one can say they’re not responsible citizens—and Steve gets his first glimpse of Bucky’s new bedroom. He registers very little outside the fact that it has a nice big bed.

They tumble back, a reverse of their position from the courthouse steps—which Steve is not going to think about, no, not now; not when he’s finally somewhere warm and safe with Bucky, and Bucky’s kneeling above him, straddling his thighs. He leans down and touches Steve’s chest—not with the same reverent surprise with which he explored Steve’s new body when they were reunited in Italy, but almost solemn all the same. He touches Steve like he’s making sure Steve is real, and this is something Steve understands, because he’s touched Bucky that way—maybe never stopped touching him that way. Bucky is a miracle and Steve wishes he could know. Steve wishes there were some way he could make Bucky understand.

Bucky looks strangely self-conscious as he takes off the shirt he threw on over his uniform for the bike ride home. The flag part of the top looks more triangular than in any of Steve’s uniforms, emphasizing Bucky’s beautiful broad shoulders. It also points helpfully downward to where the tight black fabric of the pants leaves little to the imagination (and further proves Bucky’s point about his Hayabusa).

Bucky catches Steve staring; uncharacteristically, he blushes. “This,” he gestures vaguely at his chest, “is part of all that stuff that we’re gonna talk about later, I guess.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Steve, smiling sloppily, then grinning wider when he realizes the opportunity that has, quite literally, sat itself in his lap. “But you’re keeping the outfit, right?”

Bucky drops back onto his heels. The expression on his face is not at all the expression Steve thought he would be putting on his face. “What do you mean?” he says. “Why?”

Obviously Steve is an idiot; obviously Steve hasn’t considered that Bucky may have continued fighting this whole time, picked up Steve’s shield and his mantle and gone into battle for three years purely out of some mistaken obligation to Steve’s departed self. What if all this time—and after everything he’s been through!—Bucky has wanted nothing more than an end to conflict, to the fight Steve had dragged him into in the first place? Why shouldn’t Bucky desire peace? Steve would never stand in the way of that, and he feels like an asshole for implying otherwise.

“No, I mean—not that you _have_ to; I was just—”

Bucky’s giving him a weird look, one that does not clear things up for Steve at _all_.

“I was just trying to say, you cut a fine figure in that thing, Buck,” he finishes, lamely. “You know, like—”

“I remember,” Bucky says. “I was ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death. But that’s why he’s gotta be _you_.”

Steve’s still busy wincing— _jaws of death_ , Jesus: why had he _said_ that? But Bucky’s already moving ahead. He runs a hand over his shorn hair, then much to Steve’s disappointment, slides off the bed.

“I knew we needed to talk. Fuck! I don’t know even where to start.” He casts a rueful expression back toward the bed and Steve’s heart sinks. “Except for the place I always know to start with you.”

“But,” Steve props himself up on his elbows, “we’ve got plenty of time now. Don’t we?”

Even as he says this, Steve realizes he has literally no idea: not even a scrap of a clue what’s happening in the world. And last time he awoke from death, aliens attacked like a week later, so—not a promising precedent. 

Bucky’s jawline looks sharp, set. “Press got a show tonight. They’re gonna know you’re back, they’re gonna have seen my face—someone’s gonna put the pieces together. And I don’t know after that. Even if I don’t get tried for treason, I’m certainly not somebody anybody’s gonna want as Captain America anymore. There’s only ever been one person who deserved that name.”

“Bullshit.” Steve’s feet hit the floor. “Bucky, you of all people know the name’s nothing more than some stupid piece of propaganda an asshole senator came up with to grease his own wheels—”

Bucky snorts. “Maybe. But you know that’s not what it came to mean to people—what you made it mean. You wouldn’t’ve died in that outfit— _twice_ , Steve!—if that’s what you thought.”

“Fine,” Steve has to concede, “maybe I do have a legacy. As far as I can see, you’ve been doing everything you can to honor it. People should be able to see that. Hell, people should be honoring _your legacy_ —Bucky Barnes! If it weren’t for you, I’d be a smear on the ground of an alley a century ago, or worse, a bitter old asshole with no sense of humor whatsoever—”

“It still ain’t much.” Bucky’s looking at the floor, but his shoulders have unclenched a little.

“See?” Steve says, twining his fingers around Bucky’s metal hand. 

“But that’s just it.” Bucky eyes flick up to his, a stormy grey-blue. “You’re the only one dumb enough to see me this way. Everyone else will see this.” He lifts their joined hands, light glinting off the metal. “The only legacy I’ve got is the Winter Soldier’s.”

He drops Steve's hand and steps to the side. Even when he starts stripping off his shirt, Steve has no illusions—their chance at a carefree fumble is gone. Bucky drops his uniform on the floor like it means nothing, mechanically pulls on a pair of sweats, and stalks back out to the kitchen.

Steve finds him at the stove, attempting to revive the grilled cheese. Steve wishes he could do that, too: go back to when he first saw Bucky standing in this kitchen and try it all again.

Then he realizes: he has control of his body; his tongue is his own.

“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Steve says.

Bucky freezes, halfway through scraping burnt cheese off the side of his skillet; a moment later he resumes the motion with renewed force. “Probably not.”

“It’s like a habit with us,” Steve says. “No, like…” He grips the edge of the counter, then forces himself to let go. “Like an involuntary action. I breathe. My heart beats. I love you.”

Steve’s voice doesn’t crack. He’s proud of the way his voice doesn’t crack.

“And I know you know that,” Steve continues, not discouraged by Bucky’s lack of response. “But I need you to know something else, too. And that’s that I choose you. I don’t love you because I have to—because I need to breathe, because my heart’s gotta beat. I’m here because I want to be here.” He pauses. “And because neither of us can seem to stay dead.”

Steve can’t see Bucky’s face. He hopes to god he’s at least cracking a smile.

“Anyway.” Steve coughs. “Since I came back from the dead again today, it seemed like a good time to say that.”

Bucky’s silent for a long time—long enough to make Steve nervous. Finally, he turns around. His eyes look red. Steve decides to grant him the dignity of pretending he was adding onions to the grilled cheese.

“That was a more interesting talk than the one I had planned.”

“Yeah? What did you want to talk about?”

Bucky shrugs one shoulder. “Dunno. Current events?”

“I miss anything big?”

Bucky casually ticks things off on his fingers. “We’ve got our first female president. We launched a mission to Mars. There’s like, three more new _Star Wars_ movies.”

“Wow.”

“Oh, and Wanda and Vision are dating.”

Now Steve is genuinely surprised. “Really? I mean, that's great, but…” He can feel his traitorous cheeks color. “How do they—”

Bucky huffs out a laugh. “Beats me, pal. I guess…they’ve got magic and science on their side. They make it work.”

“Magic and science, huh?” Steve likes that. Steve thinks that sounds pretty good.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and after five lifetimes and a hundred years, Steve would wager that he knows Bucky’s face better than he knows his own. He can see the promise there, of all the choices they’ve still got time to make. “What did I tell you about the future, Steve?”

Steve smiles with his whole body: feels it, electric, from head to toe. “I think it’s gonna be fun.”


End file.
